Is Sadomasochism a mental pathology? From Kraft-Ebing to Carl Jung, through years of research on the ground, Dorothy Hayden express her conclusion about masochism. A number of years ago, in connection with my work with sexual addiction, a number of lifestyle submissives started coming to me for treatment. Some of these people were extremely hesitant to discuss their reasons for seeking therapy; they were so ashamed of their fantasies and behaviors that it took years of working with them until I knew their real names or their telephone numbers.

Patients who able to be forthcoming about their masochistic behaviors and fantasies were as confused as I was. This is what I came to therapy for. I had to admit to myself that, viewed from the perspective of what I knew about the nature of the individual self, masochism puzzled me by flying in the face of everything that was rational about the nature of the human personality.

People want to be happy and to avoid pain and suffering. They seek to maintain and increase their control over themselves and their surroundings. And they desire to maintain and increase their prestige, respect, and esteem. Viewed from the perspective of these three principles about the self, masochism is a startling paradox. The self is developed to avoid pain, but masochists seek pain. The self strives for control, but masochists seek to relinquish control.

The self aims to maximize its esteem, but masochists deliberately seek out humiliation. Time and again, men would talk of the frustration of being unable to entice their wives or partners, who found these Bdsm psychology of a masochist activities to be perverse, into engaging in the sexual behaviors that they most longed for. I suspected that there was a vast number of people Bdsm psychology of a masochist felt tremendous shame and isolation about masochistic submissive longings.

I decided to check the clinical literature on masochism to better arm myself with some psychodynamic understanding of why these men, who so often felt shame-bound, were so keen to be dominated, hurt, tortured and humiliated by strong, dominate women.

This is what my research revealed: There is a long tradition of regarding masochism as the activity of mentally ill sick individuals. Freud described masochism as a perversion. One of his followers linked masochism to cannibalism, criminality, necrophilia and vampirism. Another analyst said that all neurotics are masochistics. In short, clinical perspectives have regarded masochists as seriously disturbed. Masochism became a pathological, sexual and psychopathic phenomenon all at once.

This idea is colored by lustful feeling; the masochist Bdsm psychology of a masochist in fantasies, in which he creates situations of this kind and often attempts to realize them. By this perversion his sexual instinct is often made more or less insensible to the normal charms of the opposite sex — incapable of a normal sexual life — psychically impotent. It has become practically a dogma of psychoanalytic thought that masochism is a sexual condition in which punishment is required before satisfaction can be reached.

Writing inFreud found the genesis and reference point for masochism in the Oedipus-complex. Masochism, he said, actually begins in infantile sexuality, when the wish for the incestuous connection with mother or father must be repressed. Guilt enters at this point, in connection with incestuous wishes.

The parent figure then becomes the dispenser of punishment instead of love and appears in desires for beating, spanking, etc. The fantasy of being beaten becomes the meeting place between the sense of guilt and sexual love.

Whether it involves literal pain or not, the punishment desired by the masochist is enjoyed in and of itself. Punishment and satisfaction both give pleasure — and humiliation. My research, however, did not jibe with my clinical reality.

The people who presented to me were not immature or inferior. In fact, the reverse seemed to be the case. Masochists are more likely to be successful by social standards: They are frequently individuals of inner Bdsm psychology of a masochist of character, possessed of strong coping skills with an ethical sense of individual responsibility. It is the intention of this paper to suggest ways of understanding masochism without invoking theories of mental illness.

The questions, however, remained.

ABSTRACT. A demographic questionnaire and...

I puzzled as to why so many men, raised in a culture that valued masculine initiative, assertiveness, and dominance, want to be relieved of these qualities and surrender their will to a strong, dominant woman who might torture, control and humiliate them. What was the basis of this compelling urge to surrender and serve, to relinquish control, to accept physical pain and emotional humiliation?

As I listened to my patients over the years, I began to see masochism less as a sexual aberration and more as a metaphor through which psyche speaks of its suffering and passion. Ritualized suffering seemed to be a way of giving meaning and value to human infirmities.

After all, there is no paucity of suffering in human life. None of us need go looking for pain. The suffering of helplessness, disappointment, loss, powerlessness and limitation, is a part of the human condition. It is my hunch that there is something like a universal need, wish or longing for surrender completely to certain aspects of human life and that it assumes many forms. This passionate longing to surrender comes into play in at least some instances of masochism.

Submission, losing oneself to the power of the other, becoming enslaved to the master is the ever-available lookalike to surrender. Submissives speak of a quality of liberation, freedom and expansion of the self in a scene as a situation similar to the letting down of defensive barriers. They speak of the experience of complete vulnerability. I believe that buried or frozen, is a longing for something in the environment to make possible surrender, a "Bdsm psychology of a masochist" of yielding of the false self.

The false self is an idea developed by a famous psychoanalyst who posited that most parents need their children to behave in circumscribed ways in order for the Bdsm psychology of a masochist to receive their love. A Scene sometimes allows for years of defensive barriers that support the false self to be broken through.

It carries with it a longing for the birth of the Bdsm psychology of a masochist self. The prospect of surrender may be accompanied by a feeling of dread and or relief or even ecstasy. Joyous in spirit, it transcends the pain that evokes it. Within the context of that surrender, a self-negating submissive experience occurs in which the person is enthralled by the dominant partner.

The intensity of the masochism is a living testimonial of the urgency with which some buried part of the personality is screaming to be released. The surrender is Bdsm psychology of a masochist less than a controlled dissolution of self-boundaries.

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The deeper yearning is the longing to be reached, known and accepted in a safe environment which narcissistic, dysfunctional or preoccupied parents were unable to provide the child at a young age. Fantasies of being raped, which are very common, can have all manners of meanings. Among them, one will almost always find, sometimes deeply buried, a yearning for deep surrender. In addition to the longing to surrender into a truer sense of self, masochistic behaviors have another meaning.

People need and take delight in fantasy production. Ask the Disneyland folk who cater to adults as much as to children. Scenes have tremendous potential for potentiating fantasy. Costumes, rituals, scenarios, an endless variety of sex props, and elaborate sets reveal of the richness the creative inner life and speak to the very real human need for fantasy play.

The fantasies are the carriers of a full spectrum of human feelings: They represent the suspension of normal reality that is an occasional necessity for all healthy people.

Probably the last thing masochism appears aimed at is balance. In keeping with its paradoxical nature, masochism provides not so much a state of weakness, but a sense of surrender, receptivity and sensitivity. Masochism is the condition of submitting fully to an experience, which counters lives that, Bdsm psychology of a masochist our Western society, are ego-centered, constrained, rational, and competitive. Strength can be a terrible Bdsm psychology of a masochist. It is a constraint, which can be relieved in moments of abandonment, of letting down and letting go.

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So it is hardly surprising that the pull of masochistic experiences should be so strong in a culture the overvalues ego strength at the expense of a fuller experience of all dimensions of psychic life.

In conclusion, I believe that therapists need to radically alter their approach to doing psychotherapy with masochistic patients. Perhaps because the paradigm from which these therapists operate are faulty. The recognition of value and meaning "Bdsm psychology of a masochist" the desire to suffer humiliation runs counter to the prevailing attitude in psychology. The main thrust of modern theory and practice has been toward ego psychology.

The values of psychotherapy have been aimed, for the most part, at building strong, coping, rational problem-solving egos. Ego-values are certainly worthy ones, yet it costs something to gain strength, to cope, to be rational and to solve problems.

This may account for the dissatisfaction many people feel after years of psychotherapy. Building a strong ego is only one side of the story; it neglects other, crucial parts of the human psyche.

I discussed the prevalence of...

Modern psychology has been in large measure dominated by helping people develop independence, strength, achievement decisive action, coping and planning. The psychoanalyst most in tuned with the missing element in psychotherapeutic work with masochism is Carl Jung.

The essential component is not...

The shadow is the tunnel, channel, or connector through which one reaches the deepest, most elemental layers of psyche. Going through the tunnel, or breaking the ego defenses down, one feels reduced and degraded. Embracing the shadow, on the other hand, provides a fuller sense of self-knowledge, self-acceptance and a fuller sense of being alive.

Submission to masochistic pain, loss of control and humiliation serves to embrace our shadow rather than deny it. The result is the achievement of an inner life that accepts and embraces all aspects of our selves and allows us to live with a deeper sense of our true selves. In addition, many patients speak of achieving a loss of self-awareness that they describe as ecstasy or bliss in which the individual transcends his normal limits and ceases to be aware Bdsm psychology of a masochist self in ordinary terms.

She is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. You can contact her with the E-mail: Your email address will not be published. There was a definite connection between suffering and pleasure the intrigued me.

The Neurobiology of BDSM Sexual Practice practices involving bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) that are otherwise not. This study also raises significant concern about the appropriateness of the diagnosis of sexual masochism and sadism in the Diagnostic and.